MITCHELL LIERMAN
liermanm2@lopers.unk.edu

Green Day’s new album ‘Father of All…’ started the band’s 2020 comeback by completely dropping the ball. Shaky down to its foundations, ‘Father’ will surely contend for the worst major album of the decade.

And we’re not even three months into the new year.

This album is the pure embodiment of everything wrong with punk culture since the beginning of the 2000s. Without offering anything unique or exciting, Green Day has successfully managed to create a new level of awful commercial punk that nobody could have known they didn’t need or want. 

Combining all of the worst aspects of My Chemical Romance’s discography with the glaring brightness of Panic at the Disco!’s oversaturated mid 2010s sound, this record can only be said to be completely exploitative of the very culture the title claims to be representing.

There aren’t words to completely describe everything wrong with this album, from its jarring tone to its lack of any kind of sonic diversity. 

Every single track suffers from horrible production which buries Billy Joel Armstrong’s already mediocre at best vocal performance. The guitar is mixed over everything at a horrendously generic punk overdriven tone. Worse, Armstrong sounds as if he recorded every track using a Burger King drive-thru headset mic, with tinny, canned tones scraping around at the very bottom of every mix. 

The inclusion of snapping snares and clap tracks on a few of the tracks is the black licorice icing on top of this cake of leftover glitter from the 2008 pop punk scene. Just when you thought the record couldn’t get any more mind-numbingly commercial and forced, these elements come to ruin the listening experience like a fist to the face.

And while on the topic of fists, let’s discuss the fact that this album’s art is a lazy rebranding of the band’s seminal effort ‘American Idiot-’ the only idiots left are the people who came into this album expecting the old Green Day to put out a record that stays true to their roots while simultaneously adapting to modern scene culture. The punk scene is ripe; with the Internet driving alternative culture, there is no reason this album couldn’t have been a landmark other than the simple fact that it is a complete and total dumpster fire.

Other acts with similar 2020 plans to Green Day should take note of ‘Father’ as the hallmark example of what not to do if you want to speak to your audience. With My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, and Weezer all on tour this year, maybe one of these acts can produce the record that ‘Father of All…’ should have been. 

More likely we will see the same commercialization and dilution of punk that we have seen since the days of Black Flag and the Sex Pistols passed long ago. No, at the end of the day, ‘Father of All…’ proves that fans should not look to the washed up, sold-out past heroes of punk for cutting edge work. This album rightfully receives a rating of 0 Lopes out of 5, and if I’m lucky, I won’t have to hear a single cut off of this record again as long as I live.